/lit/ - Literature

>>20646188
>There's a difference between the Platonic-Orphic-Egyptian lineage traditions of awakening to the unconditioned state and the modern occultist milieu which is rooted in Mesmer and Swedenborg;
The “Platonic-Orphic-Egyptian” thread is there in G., down to Orpheus and Egypt even playing roles in a text like BTTHG. And I’m not thickheadedly dodging the sense behind this of the awakening to a transcendent reality, to the numinous, to the Absolute, to the Godhead, either, by taking it so literally and simply pointing out that Orpheus and Egyptian history and tradition are literally mentioned by G. (although they also are literally mentioned by G.).

>“You must know that the learned beings then in Babylon, the members of the club of the Adherents-of-Legominism, were called by the other learned beings of that time who were well disposed towards them, as they also called themselves, by the name which your contemporary favorites would write as ‘Orpheist.’
>”This word is composed from two definite roots of words then in use, which in contemporary times would signify ‘right’ and ‘essence.’ If someone was called this, it meant that he ‘rightly sensed the essence.’
...
>”And it was the basis because it appeared in the word by which the learned mysterists were designated and also in the word which stood for a personality invented by the ancient Greeks, with whose name, as I have already said, one of the schools-of-art then existing had been connected; and the result of this was that the mentioned representatives of this terrestrial art of that time, with their already now quite bobtailed reason, thought that it was nothing more than the word indicating ‘the-followers-of-this-historical-personality-Orpheus,’ and as many of them did not regard themselves as his followers, then instead of the mentioned word they just invented the word artist.
(Chapter 30, Beelzebub going on a philological digression on how the word “artist” is a corruption from the word “Orpheist”)

>>20645946
> What's satanic about Gurdjieff, Crowley, and others like them is that their aim is to augment the human being rather than align their will with the divine will of God.
A quote by a student of Gurdjieff’s, Maurice Nicoll, who came to write fascinatingly beautiful, in-depth commentaries on subjects like Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Christian theology and the Gospels specifically, and some of the psychological teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky — a very brief and simple one.

>The object of all real esotericism is to connect Man with the will of God.
Maurice Nicoll